Broad Street Buzz
Fansided

Philadelphia Flyers Penalty Kill Providing Foundation for Wins

By Marc Naples

facebooktwitterreddit

The Philadelphia Flyers might be having a rocky season but there is one thing that they excel at: the penalty kill.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the Flyers regressing from a playoff team in 2013-14 to a lottery team in 2014-15 was penalty killing.  When the Flyers were a playoff team, they had a top 10 penalty kill at 84.8%.

Last season, the Flyers penalty kill percentage plunged to the low 70s at the beginning of the season.  By the time the Flyers penalty kill stabilized, they were out of the playoff picture.  Eventually the Flyers finished the season with a kill rate of 77.1%, 27th in the league.

More from Editorials

The Flyers penalty kill didn’t appear to be much improved at the beginning of this season.  As of a few weeks ago, their penalty kill percentage was hovering at around 76%.  The Flyers penalty kill has since gotten very hot.  They are currently on a streak of 19 penalty kills in a row after the win in New York, raising their season penalty kill percentage to 80.7% and 15th overall.

It is no coincidence that Flyers are having their best run of results during this penalty kill streak.  It is easy for fans and writers to romanticize the impact of individuals on the lineup, such as the call-up of Shayne Gostisbehere, or the return from injury of Pierre-Édouard Bellemare.  Another old adage is that your best penalty killer is your goalie, and certainly Steve Mason has played well of late and Michal Neuvirth has been excellent all season.  It looks, however, that a simple reduction in shot volume earned through a team effort is the biggest factor in improving the penalty kill this year.

Ghost doesn’t kill penalties.  Bellemare played plenty of penalty kill minutes last season, so that’s nothing new.  And even penalty kill save percentages have hardly changed since last year, as shown here.

The penalty kill has to be a team effort.  Right now the Flyers are doing a better job at interfering with opposition zone entries, and they are not spending long periods stuck in the defensive zone.  No one player can accomplish those things, nor overcome the failure of his teammates to do so on the penalty kill.  The Flyers still have work to do to get back to 2013-14 efficiency, but if they can limit shots as a group, the rest takes care of itself.

Historically, teams with bad penalty kills don’t go very far, if they even make the playoffs at all.  A reliable penalty kill is fundamental in today’s low-scoring NHL.  This truth is doubly important given the Flyers’ difficulty to score.  The offense may have some pent up goals in it, but they have been a low scoring team for multiple seasons now and that is unlikely to change in any significant way.

Given their limp offense, the Philadelphia Flyers will likely need a top-10 penalty kill to be a playoff team this season.  This was the case two years ago, and it’s something they can certainly do again.  For my money, whether or not the penalty kill can perform will be a bigger factor in their season record than anything individual players bring.

More from Broad Street Buzz

Home/Editorials